MatSalted is right up there with the best of Khanti-teachers, that's for sure.

"For a disciple who has conviction in the Teacher's message & lives to penetrate it, what accords with the Dhamma is this:'The Blessed One is the Teacher, I am a disciple. He is the one who knows, not I." - MN. 70 Kitagiri Sutta

It will probably be clear from the following responses that I don't have any of your issues with this stuff and hopefully almost as clear that I am neither a very 'religious' person nor a very passionate person. You can call me a buddhist or call me not a buddhist, I don't care. I'll keep on meditating whether there are buddhists or not.

Mysteries don't appeal to me. Beliefs don't appeal to me and I don't take anything on faith. I consider pride loathsome if it arises in my own mind and often repulsive when I observe it in others. It doesn't seem as if any of the other respondents have had the same issues with the subject as you have. For what it's worth, I think the changes in your attitude reflect a measure of improvement, for you. I suggest you continue on with your own processes of sorting this out, probably your views will continue to change. Views do that.

There was a time when I didn't know what kamma was and there was a time when I didn't have any experience of my own which would incline me to accept the idea of rebirth. Then there was further experience and exercise of the faculties and now I can observe kamma and I can reflect upon various insights and experiences which lend support to the idea of rebirth. I still don't feel any pride in regards to these developments and I would consider it a problem if I did. I still don't 'believe' in either kamma or rebirth but I have sufficient experience now to consider both of these the most viable working hypothesis I have found in terms of the whole body of firsthand evidence directly available to me at this point.

My interest has been motivated by my interest in understanding what it is that I am and what it is that is going on in our so called 'reality'. I'm not interested in arguing with people about this or anything else. I think attempting to convince myself of anything is counterproductive and I think that is also true of trying to convince anyone else of anything.

When I first encountered the idea of rebirth I had no reason to think that rebirth had any basis in reality I also had no reason to think that it didn't. At that point I could see that it wasn't an idea that was very central to my concerns. Now that I have had some insights into this and some personal experiences with the subject I would say the same kinds of things, it is not very central to my concerns, I don't give it much thought and I'm not particularly interested in the subject.

What is obvious to me, in innumerable ways, is that what we don't deal with now, we will have to deal with later and I don't personally need any further evidence to understand how incalculably much later the indefinitely later can become. Either we get seriously into dealing with things that are central to the dilemma of the human condition or we don't. Rebirth may put the more significant concerns into a much larger frame but it doesn't contribute much of anything to focusing on what needs to be done in the present. Dealing with things in the present is the only kind of Dhamma practice that means a darn thing to me because it is the only kind of practice that fosters effective progress on the path to ever greater realization, freedom and understanding and it does this consistently, day after day after day.

--------Oh, and Tilt, now that I've seen it, I feel I must apologize again for calling you a pointy headed academic back when we first ran into each other on the grey board many aeons ago. My bad, obviously it was the tinfoil headgear that I was sensing and not your actual brain casing.

“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.” - Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Learn this from the waters:in mountain clefts and chasms,loud gush the streamlets,but great rivers flow silently.- Sutta Nipata 3.725

"For a disciple who has conviction in the Teacher's message & lives to penetrate it, what accords with the Dhamma is this:'The Blessed One is the Teacher, I am a disciple. He is the one who knows, not I." - MN. 70 Kitagiri Sutta

Has anyone looked at the idea that rebirth is a delusion and the buddha saw and taught this but it got overwhelmed by mystical/hindu afterlife notions?

This is what I believe

Thanks

Mat

And your basis for this belief?

.

++++++++++++++++This being is bound to samsara, kamma is his means for going beyond. -- SN I, 38.

There is freedom from birth, freedom from becoming, freedom from making, freedom from conditioning. If there were not this freedom from birth, freedom from becoming, freedom from making, freedom from conditioning, then escape from that which is birth, becoming, making, conditioning, would not be known here. -- Ud 80

Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireas na daoine.People live in one another’s shelter.

"For a disciple who has conviction in the Teacher's message & lives to penetrate it, what accords with the Dhamma is this:'The Blessed One is the Teacher, I am a disciple. He is the one who knows, not I." - MN. 70 Kitagiri Sutta

++++++++++++++++This being is bound to samsara, kamma is his means for going beyond. -- SN I, 38.

There is freedom from birth, freedom from becoming, freedom from making, freedom from conditioning. If there were not this freedom from birth, freedom from becoming, freedom from making, freedom from conditioning, then escape from that which is birth, becoming, making, conditioning, would not be known here. -- Ud 80

Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireas na daoine.People live in one another’s shelter.